Philippe Grégoire Regis

Philippe Grégoire Regis was a French Jesuit sinologist and the revising editor of an early Latin translation of the I Ching, published in 1834. His version is presented as both a major European attempt to explain the classic and a cautionary example of literal translation: its historical approach came close to the text’s political context, but its word-for-word rendering obscured the meaning it sought to convey. The translator’s account ultimately treats Regis’s work not as simply a failure, but as a substantial scholarly contribution whose limitations helped clarify the problem of how to translate the I Ching.

The Latin translation and its collaborators

Regis’s translation was a collective undertaking. Joseph de Mailla rendered the Chinese into Latin word for word and compared that result with the Manchu version of the I Ching. Peter du Tartre principally supplied historical illustrations. Regis revised the work of both collaborators, enlarged it, and added his own dissertations and notes. The division of labor mattered to the book’s character: it combined close linguistic comparison, historical contextualization, and Regis’s editorial synthesis rather than presenting a bare translation alone.

The work was undertaken by Regis and other Roman Catholic missionaries at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but it did not reach the public until 1834, when Jules Mohl published it. Its title began with the Latin phrase “Y-King, antiquissimus Sinarum liber,” presenting the I Ching as an ancient Chinese book. In the period described, Regis’s was the only Western-language translation available when the later translator first took up the work in 1854. It therefore served not merely as an individual interpretation but as the starting point against which subsequent European efforts were measured.

A historical reading of the classic

The account credits Regis and his collaborators with an important insight: they understood the text as relating to transactions between the founders of the Zhou dynasty and the last sovereign of the Shang, and believed that its meaning could be illuminated historically. Their interpretation was too narrow, but it was judged an approximation of the truth. That achievement distinguishes their work from a reading that treats the I Ching as a collection of detached, inexplicable oracles. It located the text in political history, even if it did not, in the later translator’s view, fully account for the classic’s structure.

A contemporary response conveys the relief that this historical framing could offer. Jules Mohl said that he liked the work because, coming to it out of a sea of mist, he found solid ground. The image captures the translation’s value as an interpretive foothold: the text might remain difficult, but historical explanation made it seem approachable. At the same time, the book stresses that Regis’s team did not sufficiently distinguish the Text from the Appendixes. Their treatment of the third and subsequent appendixes was also, in the author’s judgment, shadowed by the assumption that Confucius was responsible for them.

Literalness and the problem of translation

The principal criticism of Regis’s version is its excessive literalness. Its Latin rendering, the later translator says, was all but unintelligible. He describes his own first attempt at an English version as similarly unsuccessful: in 1854 he had tried to preserve the concise form of the Chinese so closely that the English consisted of words with little or no marked syntactical connection. He had followed Regis and his collaborators in this approach, and concluded that his own result was no less obscure. Regis thus figures in a practical lesson: formal closeness to the source can preserve the appearance of its compactness while failing to communicate its thought.

The alternative the later translator develops is to treat Chinese written characters not as representations of spoken words but as symbols of ideas, and their combination not as a transcript of what a writer would say but as an expression of what the writer thinks. On that account, literal translation is inadequate. Once the symbols have brought the translator’s mind into relation with the author’s, the translator may express the ideas in another language as clearly and faithfully as possible. This freedom is not a license to invent: a translator should represent the original meaning accurately and concisely, adding only the occasional word needed to make explicit what the original writer left implicit. The account says such additions are generally enclosed in parentheses, though it also questions whether that marking is necessary when the added words were already present in the writer’s thought.

The difference between the two methods is also a difference in what a translation claims to preserve. Regis’s team pursued the Chinese closely at the level of words and form; the later translator argues that fidelity must reach the thought conveyed through the symbolic language, even when English syntax requires a fuller expression. The old version’s obscurity therefore becomes evidence of the difficulty of the classic itself, not proof that interpretation should be abandoned. Its author had to write in the manner of diviners, the account observes, and the work’s peculiar style makes it exceptionally difficult to render intelligibly.

Reception, scholarly value, and later use

Although the Latin translation could be improved, the later translator rejects the idea that it was of little value. Its prolegomena, dissertations, and notes supplied a mass of correct and useful information, and the work had nearly succeeded in unraveling the classic’s confusion and solving its enigma. In a dispute over claims that European scholars had multiplied confusion through their translations, the translator also corrects the scale of the record: the supposed host of European translators amounted, in his account, to two, Regis’s team and Canon McClatchie. Regis’s work remained the more valuable of the two as a whole, despite its defects.

Its influence continued even as new scholarship appeared. A Latin translation by Angelo Zottoli, received after the later translator’s own version had been completed and the translation of the Text had been printed, was described as a great improvement on Regis’s. Zottoli’s work was selective: it translated the Text of the first two hexagrams, material from several Appendixes associated with them, and six further hexagrams, while giving only brief summaries of the remaining fifty-six; it also printed Appendixes III, V, VI, and VII at length. The comparison places Regis at the beginning of a developing European tradition rather than outside it: later translators could improve on his Latin while working in a field his version had helped establish.

Regis’s scholarship also furnished a specific interpretive tool. In discussing the formation of the lineal figures, the later translator says that he was indebted first to Regis for a dissection of the so-called Lo writing, a scheme associated with the figures. He also notes that Zhu Xi included the treatment in an appendix to his Lessons on the I Ching for the Young. This reference shows that Regis’s contribution was not confined to the published translation: his analysis could be taken up as an aid to testing claims about the figures’ origins.

The translation’s enduring significance

The assessment of Regis is deliberately double. His translation is too literal to be readily understood, and its failure to separate the Text from the Appendixes leaves important distinctions blurred. Yet its historical approach brought the classic closer to intelligible ground, its scholarly apparatus preserved valuable information, and one of its analyses remained useful in later discussion of the lineal figures. Regis’s importance lies in this productive tension: he did not solve the problem of translating the I Ching, but his work made the problem visible and supplied materials with which later interpreters could address it.

That legacy also explains why the later translator can criticize the version without dismissing its authors. A translation may be inadequate in its English or Latin expression and still be historically perceptive, carefully assembled, and intellectually consequential. Regis’s team approached an enigmatic book through collaboration, comparative textual work, historical illustration, and editorial commentary. Their attempt offered European readers a first substantial point of contact; its very obscurity, in turn, helped motivate a different ideal of fidelity, one that sought to bring the reader into contact with the author’s thought rather than reproduce the surface arrangement of the characters.